Sunday, June 21, 2015

Winterstrike is a text adventure by Yoon Ha Lee in the Storynexus engine/universe. Like her Moonlit Tower (and much of her fiction), it trades on certain broad images – snow, mechanical birds, cities – to create a sense of space which is lived in by what I have, in the past, called fantastical materialism. It's never quite just that the magical or sfnal aspects have a material base within Lee's fictions, but that they are tropes treated as technologies. The grounded spaceships in the world of Winterstrike signify that the game takes place in the long conversation that is pulp/genre/science fiction, but that signification, the literary technique of it all, remains in tension with how it is reified.

There is, in some sense, a greater ease with which this is done in the context of a game rather than a story or novel; a game object has to be an object as well as a vessel for meaning. From the code through to the act of play: it is defined, it is interacted with productively or nonproductively, in accordance with that definition.

The Storynexus engine operates by offering the player a set of cards. At the bottom are the "pinned" cards, your (semi-)permanent hand. At the top a deck, face down. Clicking the deck fills the middle row, where cards with non-critical path options go. Playing these allows the player to advance stats, explore the world, and retrieve items. Once those have been done, the player uses the "pinned" cards to advance further along the story. The engine has recently removed much of the in game requirements that require real world currency.

Where The Moonlit Tower showed its production seams -- the small setting, the surprise of more than almost no action options -- Winterstrike seems more built around them. The engine means that the bulk of actions function as repeatable, optional vignettes; I found myself inciting riots over smokewater multiple times, but also quelling them or stealing the object to spite them, all to build up stats for reasons I didn't yet then understand. It's a strange way to engage the worlds Lee builds, but not one without merits. The gamey way that interaction is always only ever a means is a rich vein of fantastical materialist possibility, although perhaps not an especially accessible one.

You, Me, and the Cubes

You, Me, and the Cubes is the last "proper" game Kenji Eno ever made, as far as I can tell. A downloadable WiiWare physics puzzle game, it trades on the subtext of that system in a way that is, among other things, genuinely cute.

The two player version of the game is obviously the one that is at its core, where both players use Wiimotes to generate Fallos (little gendered folks) to fling onto a cube. You populate the Wiimote with them with the *jerk off motion*, then throw them by holding the Wiimote vertically and snapping your wrist. Between these actions, you each point your Wiimote at a place on the cube and click the A button to choose where they will land.

The idea is that the Fallos will (de)stabilize these transparent cubes floating in the void. Throw in synch with your partner and they have a few seconds of invulnerability when they land; out of synch and one or both are likely fucked. If the weight shifts too far, whether through poor throws or by the whims of the wandering Fallos, they might fall down and slowly slide off the cube. When one falls, it emits a keening cartoon scream, and occasionally a bit of text pops up. They say things like "WHY ME" as they struggle at the edge, only to turn into a streak of color against the empty void and then nothing.

You, Me, and the Cubes is a puzzle game where reproductive futurism is an object of mockery and futility. Where, also, of course, because it is a game, it is about mastery. Where the child is meant to be swallowed into the void, and where that swallowing is the most immediately gratifying moment of the whole endeavor. Where the puzzle itself is the social, the means by which reproduction is encouraged and undertaken. It's a game about coming together to fling children into the world, and laughing at, and about, and with, that act.

Line Crossing

Aeryne Wright's Line Crossing is a stylish, horizontal ascent into the afterlife (which, in the case of this game, is to say: into life).

The player character wakes up into a train car, wheels rumbling and text scrolling. It is suddenly night, and Afra is worried. She leaves her car, and the game begins.

Clicking on objects interacts with them, while the directional keys on the keyboard move the character. Up goes into the various cars on the increasingly abstracted train, down leaves them. Afra can speak to a number of the tall, avian beings; some with cow skull heads, others more traditionally hawklike. Many of them will offer Afra an item; once three are collected, the player can walk all the way off the train to encounter the Fates that will provide a new life.

Line Crossing is a wholly horizontal game, with progression to the left. This makes sense as a journey through and out of death, in the grammar of games. Right is forward, left back, and so Afra moves forward by going backward. The game's real draw is its art; the avian beings are cast into relief against bulbous trees and cracked, thickly abstracted creeping vines, the train itself a blocky presence on top of slow spinning, carriage-like, clattering wheels. Even the font, appearing in RPG-style white-bordered blue rectangles, is stylized to the point of obfuscation.

That this all coalesces is admirable; that it does so in service of a little tale with subtle emphasis on process even more so. A strange thing, that a pretty game with an invisible inventory is enough of a story, but it is.